The End of White Christian America

Robert P. Jones

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501122330
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Quite possibly the most illuminating text for this election year" ( The New York Times Book Review ). *Winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion*
Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, spells out the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality—that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation. For most of our nation's history, White Christian America (WCA) set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white, Christian nation.Drawing on more than four decades of polling data, The End of White Christian America explains and analyzes the waning vitality of WCA. Robert P. Jones argues that the visceral nature of today's most heated issues—the vociferous arguments around same-sex marriage and religious and sexual liberty, the rise of the Tea Party following the election of our first black president, and stark disagreements between black and white Americans over the fairness of the criminal justice system—can only be understood against the backdrop of white Christians' anxieties as America's racial and religious topography shifts around them.Beyond 2016, the descendants of WCA will lack the political power they once had to set the terms of the nation's debate over values and morals and to determine election outcomes. Looking ahead, Jones forecasts the ways that they might adjust to find their place in the new America—and the consequences for us all if they don't. "Jones's analysis is an insightful combination of history, sociology, religious studies, and political science….This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers across the political spectrum" ( Library Journal ).

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Who Is White Christian America?

White Christian America’s Life in Architecture

As visitors ascend to the observation deck of One World Trade Center in New York City, they face three floor-to-ceiling video panels, arranged to mimic the feel of a glass-walled elevator. While the elevator climbs 102 floors in 47 seconds, they watch, in time-lapse video, the visual history of the landscape from their current vantage point. After a view of the undeveloped marshes of Manhattan Island in the early 1500s, the low-rise gabled buildings of Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam appear in the simulated panoramic view. Ships fan out in the harbor during the British colonial period, and familiar bridges and skyscrapers begin to appear as the city expands to fill the horizon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Most of the media attention to the video has focused on the haunting four-second appearance of the old World Trade Center, with its identifiable pinstriped architecture, before it vanishes as the timeline moves past 2001. But the video also offers viewers a unique perspective on the Protestant church steeples that historically dominated the city’s streetscape. Two church buildings—both associated with the Episcopalian Trinity Parish—remain the most notable features of the Manhattan skyline from its early history, holding on to their status as some of the tallest and most recognizable buildings in New York nearly until the dawn of the twentieth century.

As the elevator approaches the 250-foot mark and the time-lapse reaches 1760, St. Paul’s Chapel appears in lower Manhattan, towering over the rest of the city. St. Paul’s—which survived both the massive New York fire of 1835 and the September 11 terrorist attacks—is the oldest public building in continuous use in New York City and has served as an important civic and religious space for more than 250 years. Following his 1789 inauguration, for example, George Washington attended prayer services at St. Paul’s Chapel and regularly appeared there on Sunday mornings. By 1790, Trinity Church was completed a few blocks south of St. Paul’s, on Broadway. When Trinity Church was rebuilt and enlarged in 1846, it became the tallest building in New York. Trinity held this distinction until 1890, when a building erected to house one of Joseph Pulitzer’s newspapers surpassed it. With his private office in the building’s dome, Pulitzer could look down not only at his newspaper competitors but at the city’s church steeples as well.

As the elevator continues its climb and the video reaches the 1930s, high-rises mushroom across the skyline, dwarfing the city’s houses of worship. Corporate structures like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building become New York’s defining steeples. The great Episcopal churches’ lacy spires may once have marked the hub of the city’s social scene, but churches are now eclipsed architecturally and culturally by commercial centers.¹

A time-lapse panorama of virtually every major American city would tell a similar story. Today, accustomed as we are to monuments to commerce, it is difficult to imagine church steeples as the most common defining characteristics of civic space. It is even harder to imagine the transformation in social consciousness this architectural revolution ignited. Where church spires once stirred citizens to look upward to the heavens, skyscrapers allowed corporate leaders to look down upon churches from their lofty offices. Instead of market transactions happening under the watchful eye of the church, these exchanges literally take place over its head and beyond its reach.²

Training the camera on White Christian America’s monuments to its own power reveals similar social transformations. White Christian America’s story can be read in the changing uses of three iconic structures: the United Methodist Building in Washington, D.C.; the Interchurch Center on New York City’s Upper West Side; and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. These buildings, edifices of the white Protestant Christian hope and power that rose and receded over the course of the twentieth century, represent—respectively—the high-water mark of the first wave of white mainline Protestant denominational optimism in the Roaring Twenties, the second wave of white mainline Protestant ecumenism at midcentury, and the third wave of white evangelical Protestant resurgence in the 1980s.³

At each building’s opening ceremony, white Protestant leaders spoke in prophetic tones about the indispensable place of Christianity in upholding America’s moral and political health. Today, though, all of these buildings have a different purpose from their founders’ ambitions. Each edifice has adapted—or even been transformed—to reflect the realities of a swiftly changing country. Indeed, through the life of these buildings, we can see the decline of white Protestant dominance amid the steady diversification of the American religious landscape.

The United Methodist Building (Washington, D.C., 1923): White Mainline Protestant Optimism

The United Methodist Building (Washington, D.C., 1923)

PHOTOGRAPH PROVIDED BY UNITED METHODIST CHURCH GENERAL BOARD OF CHURCH AND SOCIETY. USED WITH PERMISSION.

In 1922, the Methodist Episcopal Church purchased a muddy lot across the street from the U.S. Capitol. Completed in 1923 and dedicated in 1924, the United Methodist Building was conceived by the nation’s largest and most prominent Christian denomination as a “sentinel” for Protestant Christian witness and social reform in the nation’s capital.⁴ The five-story triangular limestone edifice would become the only nongovernment building on Capitol Hill. It towered over Maryland Avenue, its balconies and plate glass windows facing onto the Capitol’s plaza. Its opposite side faced the future site of the U.S. Supreme Court Building, which would not be completed until 1935. With a price tag of $650,000—nearly $9 million in 2015 currency—the building was designed in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with a pillared entry hall, a sweeping staircase, and gleaming marble floors.⁵

It was an expensive and imposing project, a building that was self-consciously constructed, as one prominent Methodist bishop declared, to “make our church visible and multiply its power at this world’s center.” The famed orator and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan spoke at the building’s opening ceremony.⁶ A vivid symbol of the era’s Protestant optimism—but also its desire to secure its power—the structure represented a hope that Christian social values would meld with ideals of American government. It was also intended to give Protestants an advantage over a growing Catholic population, and Methodists a preeminent place among their Protestant peers.

The architects of the United Methodist Building believed that they were returning the country’s government to its natural state of Christian righteousness. Workers broke ground on the foundation at the pinnacle of a decades-long Protestant crusade against a reviled but powerful foe: alcohol. Cries for the outright prohibition of alcohol began in the mid-nineteenth century, but the temperance movement really took off in the 1870s, when Anglo-Saxon Protestant housewives began to band together against the saloons that dominated their communities. Led by a Methodist woman named Eliza Jane Trimble Thompson—later known as “Mother Thompson”—devout Protestant women would publicly shame bar owners by praying, singing, and reading the Bible just outside the doors of any watering hole they could find.⁷ One of Thompson’s followers, Frances Willard, founded the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874, and by the early nineteenth century Protestant pastors—from Baptists to Episcopalians—were tirelessly working within a well-organized network of churches to promote abstinence from alcoholic beverages. Some congregations even began to require their members to formally renounce drinking before they were admitted into the fold.⁸

It was a moment of unusual unity for white Protestant denominations, which were fighting furiously in the early years of the twentieth century over the extent to which Christianity could be compatible with the past century of scientific innovation. The struggle for temperance provided an important—albeit fragile—common cause where most Protestants could agree that adherence to a particular kind of Christian morality would lead the country down the path of righteousness. The Methodists were at the center of this crusade, even devoting two full-time clergy to the cause. At one rally in 1915, Dr. Clarence True Wilson, a bespectacled Methodist pastor and fierce evangelist for prohibition, declared that one of the “pillars” of Christian civilization was “sobriety of the people.”⁹ Their work paid off in 1920 when the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the sale, transport, and production of alcohol, was ratified by the states.

That same year, the Methodist Episcopal Church’s General Conference endorsed the construction of a new building, to be overseen by its Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals. This was to become the United Methodist Building, a structure that the committee hoped would “offer a center for . . . Protestant activities in Washington” and allow Methodist leaders to “watch the currents of government and promote the reforms now throbbing for expression at the convictions of the people.”¹⁰

From the beginning, the United Methodist Building was imagined as a place where Christian faith and American politics could mingle, bolstering the country’s commitment to Protestant moral values in an increasingly uncertain world. Pastor Wilson, whose wife helped with the architectural plans, became intimately involved with the day-to-day operation of the building after its doors opened in 1924.¹¹ Office space on Capitol Hill was in short supply, and Wilson hoped that senators and Supreme Court justices would rent apartments on the floors above the Methodist Church’s office space, ensuring that power brokers and Christian leaders would brush shoulders throughout the day.¹²

The feeling that Protestants needed a firm foothold in the heart of American political life was strong enough, even for everyday people in the pews, that it formed the backbone of fundraising appeals. The pledge cards from ordinary Methodists whose donations paid for the building’s marble columns were all embossed with the same goal: “to establish a Protestant presence on Capitol Hill.”¹³ The building was, plainly speaking, a platform for stamping federal legislation with Protestant morality, for leveraging the power of politics to usher in the kingdom of God on earth.

Those who signed the pledges were animated by a sense of proud triumphalism and a palpable expectation that the world could be on the verge of a golden age guided by Protestant Christian values. Prohibition had passed because of nearly a century of Christian agitation, and now the country was on a path to righteousness. Wilson, on his speaking tours in the early years of Prohibition, declared that America was finally returning to its Christian foundation. The public tide against Prohibition began to turn before the ink had dried on the Eighteenth Amendment, but Wilson continued to defend the ban on alcohol as the “greatest moral triumph of Christianity in a century.”¹⁴

But this extravagant building and brash rhetoric also betrayed an undercurrent of anxiety. Why, after all, was it necessary to have an expensive, imposing building on Capitol Hill if Protestant Christianity was truly the country’s guiding compass? The truth was, Protestant leaders’ power had already begun to wane, even as they cheered Christianity’s victory against “demon rum.” Just sixteen years earlier, in 1907, Methodist leaders had exercised a more formidable form of informal power. They held a small conference in Washington, D.C., to draft a statement of fundamental moral principles, most of which centered on fair labor practices. U.S. Vice President Charles Fairbanks attended the conference and was so impressed by the document that he invited the five principal drafters to present them to President Theodore Roosevelt over breakfast at the White House.¹⁵

By the Roaring Twenties, however, Protestant leaders were in a more precarious position. The growth of powerful national corporations gave business leaders unprecedented economic power and access to political leaders. Fractured internally by infighting over issues like the teaching of evolution in public schools, Protestant leaders were also acutely aware of the threat posed by the growing influence of the Catholic Church.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the United Methodist Building was inaugurated in a period of intense anti-Catholic sentiment. The temperance movement had always been tinged with a strong anti-Catholic flavor. Stereotypes of the drunken, lazy Irish immigrant fed currents of anxiety that uncontrollable aliens were subverting the morally upright, abstinent impulses of American society. Well into the twentieth century, Protestant critics accused the Catholic Church of debasing Christianity, encouraging ignorance and superstition among its members, and stifling religious freedom and democratic citizenship through blind obedience to the pope and his U.S. deputies, local Catholic bishops and priests. But by the 1920s, thanks to rapid population growth, Roman Catholicism’s influence could no longer be ignored—hence the need for an assertive “Protestant presence” in the nation’s capital. The building’s role as “sentinel” had a double meaning—both to keep a watchful eye on congressional activity and to warn against potential Catholic encroachment.

For the first few years of its existence, the building’s caretakers felt that they were on the path to success. There was an abundance of tenants, including a handful of senators, and thanks to the rental income, the building was turning a profit. The dining room, where politicians and staff could eat during the day, was always overflowing with visitors. Two months after Black Tuesday—when the stock market crashed in 1929, plunging the country into the Great Depression—the board of the United Methodist Building was planning a costly expansion, adding apartments that could hold an additional three dozen tenants.¹⁶

But the country’s economic doldrums—and a rising backlash against the Eighteenth Amendment—soon cast a shadow over the Methodist Church’s glorious experiment. Rents were down across Washington by 1930, and it was a struggle to keep the building even half full.¹⁷ Meanwhile, other Protestants began to criticize the denomination. In an editorial published in early 1931, the editors of The Christian Century, the flagship mainline Protestant magazine, shook their fingers at the Methodists’ unilateral incursion into political affairs, which they saw as undermining a broad Protestant voice. “Does the Methodist Church, as such, desire to bring direct denominational pressure to bear upon the national government?” they wrote. “Any such concentration of ecclesiastical officialism at the nation’s capital goes aga...